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Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) are sequences of functions that formalize the process of precision medicine. DTRs take as input patient information and output treatment recommendations. A major focus of the DTR literature has been on the estimation of optimal DTRs, the sequences of decision rules that result in the best outcome in expectation, across the complete population were they to be applied. While there is a rich literature on optimal DTR estimation, to date there has been minimal consideration of the impacts of nonadherence on these estimation procedures. Nonadherence refers to any process through that an individual's prescribed treatment does not match their true treatment. We explore the impacts of nonadherence and demonstrate that generally, when nonadherence is ignored, suboptimal regimes will be estimated. In light of these findings we propose a method for estimating optimal DTRs in the presence of nonadherence. The resulting estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal, with a double robustness property. Using simulations we demonstrate the reliability of these results, and illustrate comparable performance between the proposed estimation procedure adjusting for the impacts of nonadherence and estimators that are computed on data without nonadherence.

The human severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2), causing the COVID-19 disease, has continued to spread all over the world. It menacingly affects not only public health and global economics but also mental health and mood. While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely studied, relatively fewer discussions about the sentimental reaction of the population have been available. In this article, we scrape COVID-19 related tweets on the microblogging platform, Twitter, and examine the tweets from Feb~24, 2020 to Oct~14, 2020 in four Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary) and four U.S. cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle). Applying the Vader and NRC approaches, we evaluate the sentiment intensity scores and visualize the information over different periods of the pandemic. Sentiment scores for the tweets concerning three anti-epidemic measures, masks, vaccine, and lockdown, are computed for comparisons. The results of four Canadian cities are compared with four cities in the United States. We study the causal relationships between the infected cases, the tweet activities, and the sentiment scores of COVID-19 related tweets, by integrating the echo state network method with convergent cross-mapping. Our analysis shows that public sentiments regarding COVID-19 vary in different time periods and locations. In general, people have a positive mood about COVID-19 and masks, but negative in the topics of vaccine and lockdown. The causal inference shows that the sentiment influences people's activities on Twitter, which is also correlated to the daily number of infections., Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 1 table

Measurement error is a pervasive issue which renders the results of an analysis unreliable. The measurement error literature contains numerous correction techniques, which can be broadly divided into those which aim to produce exactly consistent estimators, and those which are only approximately consistent. While consistency is a desirable property, it is typically attained only under specific model assumptions. Two techniques, regression calibration and simulation extrapolation, are used frequently in a wide variety of parametric and semiparametric settings. However, in many settings these methods are only approximately consistent. We generalize these corrections, relaxing assumptions placed on replicate measurements. Under regularity conditions, the estimators are shown to be asymptotically normal, with a sandwich estimator for the asymptotic variance. Through simulation, we demonstrate the improved performance of the modified estimators, over the standard techniques, when these assumptions are violated. We motivate these corrections using the Framingham Heart Study, and apply the generalized techniques to an analysis of these data.

Autoregressive (AR) models are useful tools in time series analysis. Inferences under such models are distorted in the presence of measurement error, which is very common in practice. In this article, we establish analytical results for quantifying the biases of the parameter estimation in AR models if the measurement error effects are neglected. We propose two measurement error models to describe different processes of data contamination. An estimating equation approach is proposed for the estimation of the model parameters with measurement error effects accounted for. We further discuss forecasting using the proposed method. Our work is inspired by COVID-19 data, which are error-contaminated due to multiple reasons including the asymptomatic cases and varying incubation periods. We implement our proposed method by conducting sensitivity analyses and forecasting of the mortality rate of COVID-19 over time for the four most populated provinces in Canada. The results suggest that incorporating or not incorporating measurement error effects yields rather different results for parameter estimation and forecasting.

This paper investigates the property of the penalized estimating equations when both the mean and association structures are modelled. To select variables for the mean and association structures sequentially, we propose a hierarchical penalized generalized estimating equations (HPGEE2) approach. The first set of penalized estimating equations is solved for the selection of significant mean parameters. Conditional on the selected mean model, the second set of penalized estimating equations is solved for the selection of significant association parameters. The hierarchical approach is designed to accommodate possible model constraints relating the inclusion of covariates into the mean and the association models. This two-step penalization strategy enjoys a compelling advantage of easing computational burdens compared to solving the two sets of penalized equations simultaneously. HPGEE2 with a smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalty is shown to have the oracle property for the mean and association models. The asymptotic behavior of the penalized estimator under this hierarchical approach is established. An efficient two-stage penalized weighted least square algorithm is developed to implement the proposed method. The empirical performance of the proposed HPGEE2 is demonstrated through Monte-Carlo studies and the analysis of a clinical data set.